And the least-read political book is …

posted at 4:01 pm on July 7, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

I’ve always suspected that most political books go largely unread, and that people buy them either for the fad factor or to serve as reference material for later use. We finally have a measure to test that hypothesis, the Wall Street Journal reports, developed by University of Wisconsin mathematics professor Jordan Ellenberg. Ellenberg calls it the “Hawking Index” in honor of physicist Stephen Hawking, whose book A Brief History of Time is reportedly “the most unread book of all time.” Ellenberg lays out his method:

How can we find today’s greatest non-reads? Amazon’s “Popular Highlights” feature provides one quick and dirty measure. Every book’s Kindle page lists the five passages most highlighted by readers. If every reader is getting to the end, those highlights could be scattered throughout the length of the book. If nobody has made it past the introduction, the popular highlights will be clustered at the beginning.

Thus, the Hawking Index (HI): Take the page numbers of a book’s five top highlights, average them, and divide by the number of pages in the whole book. The higher the number, the more of the book we’re guessing most people are likely to have read. (Disclaimer: This is not remotely scientific and is for entertainment purposes only!)

Be sure to bear that disclaimer in mind. For instance, I make frequent use of highlights in books for study, but less so with books I read for entertainment — which are few and far between these days, alas. The Kindle system also provides rough measures of farthest spot read, but that’s (a) not readily available to outsiders and is used more for synchronizing between devices, and (b) is also deceptive, because it will mark a “farthest read” point when just looking up a passage. Ellenberg’s Hawking Index is probably the best we’ll get as a metric for actual reads, at least in the near future.

Hawking’s book does indeed come in near the bottom of Ellenberg’s list, but not dead last. That honor belongs to this year’s fad read, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, with a Hawking Index of 2.4%. The deepest penetration of the top five most popular highlights comes on page 26 … out of almost 700. The issue with Capital might be that the discovery of serious flaws in Piketty’s data discouraged people from bothering to read the book even after they spent money on it.

So, naturally, we decided to apply this methodology to “Hard Choices” and other recent or comparable political books. And we have our own ranking, which we now present in order from estimated-least- to estimated-most-read.

1. “Hard Choices,” by Hillary Clinton. Hawking Index: 2.04 percent.
Well, there you have it. The deepest into Hard Choices the popular highlights get is page 33, a quote about smart power. Three of the five most-popular highlights occur within the first 10 pages. We will note the same caveat that Ellenberg applies to Piketty. “Hard Choices” is fairly new, and fairly long. Still, though, one would think more people had made it past page 33.

The most popular quote? “Do all the good you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” Which, like several of the top quotes from the authors listed below, isn’t actually a quote from Hillary Clinton. Instead, it’s a mantra from her family’s Methodist faith.

That’s actually a worse score than Piketty’s book gets, although the penetration is a bit deeper. George W. Bush’s Decision Points gets a 19.1%, if I’ve done the Hawking Index math correctly, which outdoes everyone on this list except Robert Gates. Two of the five most popular highlights land on pages 190 and 195 of the 512-page book, with the latter being the most popular — and a quote from Abraham Lincoln. Interestingly, it outperforms both of the original Clinton memoirs, too.

All that said, don’t read too much into this. It’s likely that some of the book sales (especially Kindle) have been for the purpose of reference material for the upcoming presidential election, and reviews have already noted that there isn’t much worth highlighting in this latest memoir from the former Secretary of State. The bigger problem for the Clintons is the book sales themselves, which have plummeted in week 2 and again in week 3:

Do you own a hard copy of Hillary Clinton’s book Hard Choices? If so, you’re in exclusive company. According to data provided to the Post by Nielsen BookScan, a little over 26,000 more copies of the book were sold in its third week — down almost 46 percent from the week prior, which was down 44 percent from the week before that.

It has sold about 160,000 copies in hard cover, total — just a little less than the population of Salem, Oregon. It’s sold one book for every 411 Obama voters in the 2012 general election, fewer copies than there were Obama voters in every state besides the Dakotas, Alaska and Wyoming. If every Obama voter in Idaho had bought the book, it would have done 32.5 percent better. Enough people bought Hard Choices that they couldn’t all fit into Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, but only 50,000 people would have to have someone sit on their laps. …

Addendum: On the other hand, if you want a real page turner, there’s always …

Regnery has a new paperback edition release out today, with a new foreword written by me (and with a nice cover credit, too). If you read this back when it was first released 13 years ago, pick up a fresh copy — and if you’ve never read it, you owe it to yourself to do so now. (Note: My foreword does not appear in the Kindle version.)

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Of the books that have sold, I bet most were bought by unions, schools, and government agencies.

Where did you dig up that bad photo of The Hildabeast? She sure looks someways taaaard.

ConstantineXI on July 7, 2014 at 4:12 PM

L. Ron Hubbard got busted pumping the sales of his books. He would instruct his drones to go out and buy as many copies as they could find, and then ship them back to “home base”. When more orders arrived to replace the “sold” inventory, he would ship the “old” ones.

One bookstore got a box of them and was thrilled to discover that they already had price stickers on them. From another store.

Hubbard would have say, 100k books printed, and then “sell” millions of copies.

L. Ron Hubbard got busted pumping the sales of his books. He would instruct his drones to go out and buy as many copies as they could find, and then ship them back to “home base”. When more orders arrived to replace the “sold” inventory, he would ship the “old” ones.

One bookstore got a box of them and was thrilled to discover that they already had price stickers on them. From another store.

Hubbard would have say, 100k books printed, and then “sell” millions of copies.

None of the GIANTS of the genre who were his contemporaries, such as Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, Heinlein, etc, had to resort to such tricks to secure their fortunes… Then again, if any of those masters of the art decided to invent a religion based on space aliens they would have come up with a MUCH better story than Hubbard…

Actually, it was to get the FDA off his back. He had claimed a scientific/medical background for Dianetics at first. Then the government began investigating him for practicing medicine without a license. So he recast it as divinely-inspired and turned it into a religion — protected by the First Amendment.

I’ve always suspected that most political books go largely unread, and that people buy them either for the fad factor or to serve as reference material for later use.

Or large buys to funnel money into the hands of these nearly-illiterate criminals. Most of Shrillary’s sales were probably to corporations run by Shrillary, people who want to suck up to Shrillary, or the Clinton Slushfund Liberry.

Ellenberg calls it the “Hawking Index” in honor of physicist Stephen Hawking, whose book A Brief History of Time is reportedly “the most unread book of all time.”

I read it. Didn’t understand all of it, but I did read it. What I couldn’t get through was a book titled “The Story of the Square root of Negative One.” Got through the part dealing with trigonometry, but once the author hit calculus I was finished.

Ellenberg calls it the “Hawking Index” in honor of physicist Stephen Hawking, whose book A Brief History of Time is reportedly “the most unread book of all time.”

I read it. Didn’t understand all of it, but I did read it. What I couldn’t get through was a book titled “The Story of the Square root of Negative One.” Got through the part dealing with trigonometry, but once the author hit calculus I was finished.

rbj on July 7, 2014 at 4:56 PM

I bought ABHOT, read it cover to cover. He made some mistakes, but thats ok. I didn’t point them out because he he gets upset when you tell him he’s wrong, and his little voice box makes him sound like a modem when he yells.

I don’t believe the first premise. My copy of Hawking was read by several people. My local public library system had dozens of copies and had a waiting list for a couple of years which is why I bought my own copy.

The best political book I’ve read in its entirety recently (last 20 years) was Dick Cheney’s In My Time I found the book extremely enlightening. It also reinforced my dislike for Colin Powell. Bush’s book was ok. After reading it I think Dick Cheney was the best VP this Country has ever had. Too bad the president he served under sucked.

Amazon to develop new bookstore category to help increase sales of “Hard Choices”, by Hillary Clinton. Amazon spox says “the new category, “Hypocrisy” fills the much needed gap between fiction and non-fiction.

I read Goldberg a couple of years ago, and it was great (will look for the new one just to read Ed’s forward).
Waded through Hawking some time ago, because I keep a physics or math book for bedside reading: one chapter and I’m out.

Hey, HA, could we get Goldberg to write a couple of guest posts in return?